Seven Card Draw
by AnteNomad
Summary: Ellone, Seifer, a card game, and another. The things you learn from a poker face.


**Disclaimer:** _The following is a fan fiction based upon __Final Fantasy VIII __. __Final Fantasy VIII __is copyright © 1998 by Square, not this authour. Ditto for all characters and stuff related to __Final Fantasy VIII __. This authour makes absolutely no money through this publication, and neither can you, because to do so would be illegal and mean. This disclaimer applies whether you read it or not. All your base are belong to us._

**[ Seven-Card Draw ]**

"1000 gil." Seifer tossed the coins into the pot located in-between them with nonchalant confidence. He had, Ellone noted, probably the best cards face she'd ever seen. Better even than Squall: He was always thinking too much, and someone who knew him well enough could tell from his eyes. Seifer, though, was always perfectly confident of his own victory, regardless of his actual hand.

"1100," said Ellone, raising his bet by an appropriately cautious amount. She had two sixes while he was working on a straight, but the best way to beat Seifer was to encourage his own self-confidence and then hope she got the cards.

She dealt the next round.

* * *

_"Okay, now I got the highest card, so it's my bet." Ellone dumped a pile of the polished rocks on the ground between them. "So I'm gonna bet six rocks – we'll say that's like 60 gil."_

_"D'we get money if we win?" asked Selphie._

_"No, you get the rocks! Anyway, now you've all got to either put in more rocks than I did – that's called raising – or take the rocks you've got and quit; that's folding. Oh, or you can call, which is where we compare cards and whoever's got the better ones takes everything that's in the middle. Okay?"_

_Her explanation made a fair amount of sense to the other children. Squall and Quistis each added seven rocks to the center; Selphie added eight, because she thought eight was a cooler number than seven. Irvine added eight, because that's what Selphie had done._

_Seifer took all twenty-five of the rocks Ellone had given him and, grinning, immediately dumped them in the center._

* * *

"Dammit!" Ellone had got a third six, and Seifer – struck with a worthless inside straight – was clearly not happy. Ellone refrained from collecting the pot for a moment.

"You know, Seifer, a lot of this game is about misleading your opponent." Seifer glared at this, but she pressed on. "You always play the same game. You want me to think you've got the cards when you don't, and that you don't when you do. But you're always really aggressive, so what I think is, 'I can never tell anyway, so I'll just take a guess.'"

"I don't want a lesson," Seifer said. "Deal again."

"Okay," said Ellone, reshuffling the cards. "But you could use the lesson more than the gil."

* * *

_"I quit," said Irvine, tossing away his cards._

_"You mean __**fold**__," Quistis corrected, before Ellone could admonish him for throwing the cards around._

_"What-ever!" Irvine pouted for a second._

_Once again, Seifer and Ellone were the only ones left in the game. At this point, Ellone had three fours on display and was in fact holding two sixes as well. Seifer, by contrast, had managed to accumulate a set of cards that could not possibly make a stronger hand than perhaps three twos; his highest card was one of the other sixes._

_"I bet 300 gil!" he declared, shoving the rocks into the center forcefully enough that one or two went on skipping down the slope towards the beach._

_Ellone dealt the final round, and Seifer's hand remained about as useless as one could imagine. Ellone bet two rocks, and Seifer, looking as smug as ever, dumped his entire pile of rocks into the pot once more. With a sigh, Ellone regarded her obviously dominating hand against Seifer's almost implausibly weak one._

_"Okay, I fold," she said._

* * *

If Ellone didn't have the queen of clubs, Seifer could have been sporting a royal flush. But she did, although Seifer didn't know it.

"10,000 gil," Seifer said, thrusting nearly his entire coin pile into the pot.

Ellone sighed quietly. "You really don't know that I let you win, do you?"

After a second's hesitation, Seifer tried to shrug it off. "I don't remember it at all."

"Seifer," said Ellone. "If there's one person who knows what you remember, it's me." She set down her cards for a moment. "I know I'd just taught you the game. Did you really think you could have beat me somehow, or did you just refuse to think I'd maybe felt sorry for you?"

"I don't want anyone's sympathy," Seifer declared. "You gonna play or not?"

But Ellone wasn't quite ready to give up the issue. "Seifer, you want _everyone_'s sympathy. You'll just never ask for it."

This got Seifer glaring daggers at her, with enough force that Ellone decided she was done now. "…I bet 500."

Seifer didn't respond at first, continuing to glare. Ellone noticed that for once, she could see something in his eyes, and she seemed to be staring into an angry version of Squall's poker face.

"Take it," he finally said, throwing down his cards. "I fold."

Leaving a surprised Ellone to collect the cards and her winnings, he walked briskly off towards the rocky end of the shore, where the beach gave way to the low cliffs that ran up north to Balamb town.

* * *

**[Author's Notes]**

The game described is in fact a seven-card _stud_, but that title had implications I wasn't comfortable with. Plus, it's entirely possible I messed up the rules anyway, but since FF8 isn't set on Earth, I can claim that the rules differ arbitrarily based on wherever I messed up.


End file.
